But when people think of the "media business model", they usually just think of advertising. That's a big part of it, to be sure, but as those of us in the media business know, it goes far beyond that.
Here's my start at a list all the revenue models you can find in the media industry, all based around a core of free or almost-free content:

Well, it continues to happen and I'm not surprised. This time an open source company, mySQL, is bought by another company, SUN. I am curious, given the open source product development, as to the profits. See, a long time ago I heard a proprietary software developer laugh at the open source movement, something like "Someone is going to make a lot of money off of that and it won't be the contributors". Well it seems those words came to pass. The owners of mySQL are raking in a fortune while those who made it happen (the little people) got to participate.

Free, I like free. I use free stuff all the time. Firefox, Filezilla, 7zip, and Thunderbird every day, for example. My server is on some flavor of GNU/Linux with Apache, phpmyadmin, Horde, mySQL and PHP (which also includes, I’m sure, TONs more software). I have a Yahoo, Hotmail, Myway, Gmail, and AOL free email address. All of those have a variety of free to them, some are open source free (GPL, for example), some are closed source free, some are just used for free (like Google, for example) where there is no source to see. Now, with open source, it is more than mere “free” software – it carries a philosophy with it, that software should be free. The preamble to the license includes:
The licenses for most software and other practical works are designed to take away your freedom to share and change the works. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change all versions of a program--to make sure it remains free software for all its users.
Now, where this all gets ironic is the drumbeat for donations. I have several extensions I use in Firefox and a couple of them make heartfelt, earnest pleas for money, after all, they spend considerable time creating the software. If I visit open source software sites that aren’t currently backed by a commercial company, 90% of the time they are asking/accepting donations (if the product is any good and widely used).
So … which is it? Is it free or do you want money for it?

2007

An entertaining video on Internet porn--go ahead and watch it, 'cause you know you want to--produced by Good Magazine. This is a good example of cleverly using the conventions of a genre to attract attention and, at the same time, to convey information.

Corbis and Getty would have you believe that there *is* in fact a wide disparity between the images that their professionals create and the images that us weekend warrior amateurs create with our Canon 5Ds and Nikon D200s. Between the images that they want us to sell for $1 to $50 vs. images that they sell for between $200 and $2,000.
Well this is pretty plain talk, but the fact of the matter is that there is not a hell of a lot of difference anymore.
By way of example, check out this search on Zooomr for sunflower ranked by awesomeness (our proprietary algorithm for determining rank and relevancy) vs. a current search for sunflowers on Getty images.
Zooomr sunflower search
Getty Images sunflower search
Now when you look at these two seaches. Ask yourself this. Are the images on Getty that much better? Is this image worth $370 for a half page photo in a magazine for a single month?

The San Jose Mercury News, among others, is reporting that Google's YouTube will begin checking content for copyrights, specifically in a test with Disney and Time Warner's content. They finally admitted they are using Audible Magic's clever system for checking copyrighted music, which the Merc reported earlier but Google wouldn't confirm.
Now Google is asking copyright holders to send them copies of videos to check against. Mark Cuban, ever the copyright defender and YouTube attacker, cried foul at that one.
Now I'll tell you what's really happening here (in my analyst's opinion).

Is YouTube worth $1.6B? You betcha. That’s 4 cents per video stream ($1.6B divided by 100 million daily views * 365 days) and it’s still growing. Another way to think of it is that YouTube has roughly 50 million users (35M in the US according to Nielsen NetRatings, and probably another 15M worldwide) which comes out to $32 per user. It’s high, but it’s also reasonable.

Startup Pricing Models: Free Forever, Freemium and Freedom To Pay
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Of the articles I’ve written on this site, the one on giving your software away for free continues to be one of the most popular (currently ranked as #2 on the site). In response to that article, I’ve received a number of comments. Some highly insightful, some a little misguided and some a result from what is likely misunderstanding.
I’d like to take one more crack at this whole “free vs. not free” aspect of software pricing for startups.

The Freemium Business Model
I wrote a post last weekend called My Favorite Business Model. I posted it earlier today. Here is how I described the business model:
Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.

But the primary reason is simply money. Safari is a free download, but it’s already one of Apple’s most profitable software products.
It’s not widely publicized, but those integrated search bars in web browser toolbars are revenue generators. When you do a Google search from Safari’s toolbar, Google pays Apple a portion of the ad revenue from the resulting page. (Ever notice the “client=safari” string in the URL query?)
The same goes for Mozilla (and, I presume, just about every other mainstream browser.) According to this report by Ryan Naraine, for example, the Mozilla Foundation earned over $50 million in search engine ad revenue in 2005, mostly from Google.
My somewhat-informed understanding is that Apple is currently generating about $2 million per month from Safari’s Google integration. That’s $25 million per year. If Safari for Windows is even moderately successful, it’s easy to see how that might grow to $100 million per year or more.
There’ve been many attempts to finance app development with advertising; what’s interesting about web browser search engine deals is that browser developers earn money – a lot of it – for ads that users were going to see anyway, just by performing the same search without the built-in integration.